Deirdre Shoemaker

Biography

Dr. Deirdre Shoemaker is a physics professor and the director of the Center for Gravitational Physics at the University of Texas at Austin.  She received her B.S. in Physics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics from Pennsylvania State University and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and Cornell University. Dr. Shoemaker began her faculty career at Penn State in 2004. She moved to the School of Physics at Georgia Tech in 2008 where she was also an adjunct professor of the School of Computational Science and Engineering. While at Georgia Tech, she was the Associate Director of Research and Strategic Initiatives at the Institute for Data, Engineering and Sciences as well as the Director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. Deirdre joined the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. She has won the NSF Career award and is a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Shoemaker's research interests center on black holes and gravitational waves, understanding these and other aspects of strong gravity and how it reveals itself in the universe. Dr. Shoemaker uses computational techniques to both solve the complicated set of partial differential equations known as the Einstein equations and to analyze the results from these simulations for the detection and interpretation of gravitational waves. Dr. Shoemaker is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the Cosmic Explorer Consortium, and the LISA Consortium where she co-chairs the Waveform Working Group.

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